You would have to be as disconnected from current affairs as an Appalachian mountain man circa 1763, if you hadn’t noticed the heightened media coverage of China’s rise and competition with the West, and the West’s concomitant obsession with Chinese rising competitiveness. In Amy Chua’s recent book “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother,” Chinese tough-love child rearing, which is shown to produce academically excellent and highly competitive children, is pitted against Western-style parenting, which is understood to condemn a child to a life of underachievement. The clash of ideologies – education and hard work versus scholastic slackerdom and daydreaming – is being played out against the backdrop of America’s rightfully lamentable educational system. If truth be told, our country’s current “education crisis” points to systemic failures that would undermine American competitiveness far more than the alleged softness, lenity, and indulgence of us non-Tiger parents.

Whether your kid is barred from having any fun at all, attending play dates (for what, to play?), or going to bed before midnight for fear of missing out on extra credits … or not, won’t change America’s standing as the most industrious and innovative – speak most competitive – nation on earth. Say, how bad can it be, if even our Harvard dropouts (sure, throw some Stanford preemies into the mix too) continue to launch industry-defining, multi-billion-dollar companies that soak up every software engineer in the Western hemisphere who can as much as fog a mirror? The issue, of course, is that there won’t be enough American scientists and engineers to around in order to fuel America’s celebrated and inexorable industrial growth engine.

But China’s talent gap is closing fast, the battle lines are drawn for all the brains we can get in business, and better shape up if your pedagogy entailed plunking the spoilt rugrats down in front of Baby Einstein and entrusting the rest of their rugrat lives to a sub-standard educational system. Behold the Tiger Mom! There is a whole triple concerto-for violin, cello, and piano-playing cadre of scientifically-trained elite engineers lurching for your kids’ lunch box. Here’s what you do: first, you panic. Then, take ‘em out of Kindergarten Mandarin class – for that won’t help either. Finally, go growl like a tiger and join in the battle cry of practice drills, public shaming, and wretched insults in the name of achieving amazing success for your sprout.

On the face of it, Chua’s “battle hymn” mémoire is a charming but insipid ode to the joy of non-permissive parenting (imagine a typical tigerish, middle-class striver, Sino-Anne Hathaway-type, wishing for nothing more than to impart on her daughters a winning start in the lottery of life – while trashing a dollhouse during a piano recital lacking in poise and calling her offspring “garbage” just to reinforce the point). The booklet’s central claim that an Asian child’s stereotypical success is due to superior Asian parenting is substantiated by anecdotal assertions that the relentless pursuit of academic excellence, the original ‘practice makes perfect’ mindset, respect for authority, and intolerance of mediocrity are all Chinese inventions (yes, yes … along with paper, printing, gunpowder, and the bloody compass).

By contrast – as sharp as a tiger’s claw – us pampering, mollycoddling, non-straight-A-grades-tolerating, and video game-allowing (yikes, even Wii-provisioning!) Westerners have long lost the upper hand in raising a formidable youth (harking back to when Mrs. Buffett would grill young Warren mercilessly on the ins and outs of asset allocation, when William Henry Gates III was shuttled back and forth between classes in BASIC programming and predatory business practice, and – here’s a shocker – when Richard Branson, Jr. was purposely left stranded at both street corners and rock concerts to find his way home, palpably by his very own mother in her attempt to teach that little dyslexic devil a lesson or two in self-sufficiency and entrepreneurship …).

To sum up, ever since the fall of Constantinople (in 1453) or Bill Clinton’s more contemporary publication of “My Life,” has Western parenting been on the decline. If you’re in your teens today and you ain’t Tiger Mom’s perfect little cub, or if you haven’t been raised by a pushy Korean um ma or even an old-fashioned nagging Jewish mamah, chances are you’ll have to struggle mightily to make your mark in the world against the onslaught of better educated and more motivated youngsters from afar. And if you’re a parent, in particular one of those ‘spare the rod, spoil the child’ organic brassica-eating Montessori-Albert Schweitzer-ites (all non-competitive Barney and Friends-embracers-cum-spawners, as far as the Tiger Mom is concerned), you’re probably just jealous that your lesser fry hasn’t been playing Carnegie Hall at the age of 14, or you’re put out perhaps that this puerile 4-year-old of yours is still waving back at the Teletubbies.

If you belong to a book club that’s boycotting Tiger Mom’s nasty little trade secrets, fret not, mon soeur. Here’s what’s coming at you, without wishing to cause undue worry: there’s a continent’s worth of overachievers – waiting to pounce upon your children’s future jobs (like the hordes of Suleiman the Magnificent laying siege to the gates of Vienna in 1529). You must get up and unplug the Xbox right away and furthermore chasten your child to never Google a school problem’s answer again, but rather derive it from first principles like all applicants to Tsinghua University must be able to do, at the risk of getting beaten with the bamboo stick (how does a cell phone work, what is a microprocessor, how does your body absorb fat from food? … you get the point). That literary invention called globalization has obviously bound together the American and Chinese economies for the foreseeable future; while Amy Chua’s foray into popular literature has helped to politically desensitize the debate as to which culture can and will produce the brainzillas necessary for economic world domination.

It is now neither taboo to identify with extreme parenting nor to be loudly alarmed by the high, and mostly stress-related, suicide rate among China’s young people. When a group of teenagers from Shanghai posted top scores in an international test of practical knowledge in reading, mathematics, and science administered by the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development), Chinese mothers could feel vindicated, especially with the United States taking only 17th place in reading and coming in even lower in math and science. The question, of course, is not whether Chinese mothers are superior, along with their offspring, or whether Americans somehow wouldn’t wish to give their kids a winning start in life, but rather whether the US educational system is fit to train enough winning young adults in the future.

Some contend that education in this country is as broken as our health care system and would require a similarly complex overhaul, while costing the kind of money to fix that nobody is willing or able to pay. Moreover, with inequality sharply on the rise (the widening chasm between the rich and the poor within the country), what is emerging now and here is an unfortunate tale of two Americas. The inequitable distribution of wealth is closely mirrored by the unequal access to the kind of education befitting a Tiger Mom’s aspirations. Rich people pay for private schools and tutors or move their families into ZIP codes with excellent public schools (which in good/expensive neighborhoods resemble gleaming halls of learning that feed their graduates to the Ivy League; whereas students in bad/poor areas must enter their brain hospice through metal detectors). Two recent books on the subject of inequality, “Richistan: A Journey Through the American Wealth Boom and the Lives of the New Rich” by Robert Frank and “Superclass: The Global Power Elite and the World They Are Making” by David Rothkopf, have shone a spotlight on unequal educational opportunity as a worsening social indicator, as the rich are getting (far) richer, while the poor are staying (relatively) poor. (Although it is unclear how exactly it is that inequality causes all sorts of social ills – from failing school grades, more teenage pregnancies, higher crime rates, to greater obesity – it is certain that the rising tide of America’s wealth boom has not lifted all boats.)

America’s ability to produce “Outliers” (as in Malcolm Gladwell’s “Outliers: The Story of Success”), individuals who will achieve extraordinary success in life is unparalleled. This will happen with or without Tiger Moms, with or without the “10,000-Hour Rule” (if you ever wondered how Mozart became Mozart, go spend 10,000 hours practicing a specific task and see what will happen). And in your blogger’s humble opinion, right after you’ve aced your reading, math, and science tests, other leading indicators for future employment success are “uncommon intelligence,” a passion for learning something new, and a knack for entrepreneurship. How to drill those into your kid’s head? Don’t ask the Tiger Mom. A new “Battle Hymn of the Republic”? Perhaps, for America must figure out how to transform its educational system to provide democratic / meritocratic access to top-notch learning to the majority of its people, not just a few. Always remember, there are far more Chinese Tiger Moms than there are people in the States, and not even our outliers and cognitive elite will be able to compete against them alone.

What’s all the fuss about globalization being either good or bad, manageable or inevitable? Globalization is but a fuzzy measure of how globally connected, integrated, and dependent you are on others in terms of economic, technological, political, cultural, social, and not the least ecological interchange. Last time you ever poked fun at that goofy Icelander for believing in his wights, elves, and huldufólk (“hidden people”), for he’ll come right back at ya, by closing his country’s banks – turning a whole bunch of UK depositors into such huldufólk – and shutting down your airspace for weeks on end (and all you can do is sue Thor for spewing volcanic ash and other forms of Icelandic ectoplasm, including Björk, over your Fatherland). (Though on that note, the brave pilots of Deutsche Lufthansa must be congratulated for being the first to face the pulverized magma, proudly living their corporate motto that the “Hansa is flying even when the birds are walking.”)

No, globalization would be a simple and straightforward matter if we just called it global trade (and indeed, if it was just that: worldwide import/export), and if it wasn’t for such complicating factors as the vast inequalities accentuated but perhaps not caused by putting us all on an economic Mercator projection, an equal free-trade footing. In the good old days, it used to be fair and equitable: you’d send a nutter like Marco Polo off on his Silk Road to scam the Kublai Khan with some cheap Venetian costume jewelry, and the fool would come home with spaghetti – home being Italy, mind you! Let’s call this one “Bucket A”: arguments for or against the notion that the world’s haves and have-nots will benefit very differently from the effects of globalization. If the upper left-hand corner of your paycheck says “The World Bank Group,” you’ll likely be a naysayer, arguing that global inequality has risen as a function of increased globalization for a number of factual reasons that are measured in something called the “Gini coefficient,” and the explication thereof would stretch the scope of this blog as much an A-Rod-professed monogamy. Know that your blogger – like most civilized people – categorically condemns the exploitation of impoverished workers and joins with militant fervor in the persecution of all exploiters of child labor (if you can, check out our friend David Arkless’s and his company Manpower’s support of http://www.notforsalecampaign.org/ – a rather worthwhile cause!).

Some of the other, softer, and more academic arguments brought forth by the anti-Davos crowd (rash boarders, by and large, who eschew après-ski and raclette with Angelina Jolie) have to do mainly with agriculture subsidies in rich countries (thereby lowering the market price for poor farmers’ crops), the non-existence or at best weakened state of labor unions in destitute regions, and – oh behold, the Bugaboo! – the rapid growth of offshore outsourcing. In “Bucket B” we shall lump all arguments either in favor of or opposed to the notion that globalization will revert all “things” back to their normal mean. And all these things are purportedly economic, technological, political, cultural, social, and perhaps even ecological in nature (you can appreciate how complicated a well-rounded treatment of globalization can get – and most of them alas are as cohesive as Destiny’s Child). Think of it as the global equilibrium point, where say a big media company in the States is outsourcing all of its IT development to India, where the Indian IT developers – because of these two interlocking economic trends called global wage arbitrage and purchase price parity – are making a respectable middle-class living, allowing them in turn to tune into, as it so happens, their client’s satellite TV channel to watch the admittedly timeless episodes of Rachel and Friends, thus sending about $1.50 in revenues back to Burbank, California for each $1.00 spent on outsourcing. The labor savings and the incremental foreign revenues are strengthening the firm in the U.S. such that it can afford to hire more domestic workers. A spiraling win-win scenario, or so it would appear, were it not for the pesky competition all now filing into Bangalore, tilting the local supply-and-demand ratio towards ever inflating wages. Over time, as you would expect, the Bengaḷūrus will be able to command the same level of pay as the good folks back home in Burbank. That’s what “mean reversion” means in this case: everyone’s making the same rupees and watching the same TV shows (where the largest common denominator will, thank heavens, also be the lowest one – watch out Slumdog, here come Jessica Simpson’s hair extensions).

Aforementioned Buckets A and B deal with resource re-distribution and societal re-shaping, respectively. It is perhaps intuitive that according to the KOF (ETH Zürich) Index of Globalization, Belgium, Austria, and Sweden rank first among the world’s most globalized nations (and that despite ABBA!), while Iran, Burundi, and North Korea are plotting away in impressive isolation. Cynics will contend that although the driving forces behind globalization are well understood, corporations (mostly again in rich countries) are in the driver’s seat, and thus it is hardly surprising that globalization will follow a corporate, and almost by definition, opaque agenda. Others point to the “avengers” of globalization, those that are part of a nation’s diaspora, the reverse exodus of Western-trained workers back to their country of origin (such as the legions of highly educated and very successful Indians in Silicon Valley, for example, returning home to start new businesses in India). And of course, there are those who watch Roy Rogers movies on TCM and eat lots of apple pie and claim that the United States will never fall behind, because we – and nobody else! – have the monopoly on innovation. (I’ve got something innovative for you, and it’s not the Xbox 360: here in the States we’ve got more massage therapists entering the workforce every year than computer scientists; and we’re now graduating more social workers from our colleges than engineers – of course, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with massage therapy or social work, quite the contrary, but you shouldn’t then wonder why someone moved your cheese all the way from Chennai, or why there are as many Indians on the list of the top-ten richest people in the world as there are Americans.)

I’ll close with a contention that may well be controversial: our conception of globalization is about as relevant today as Paul Bremer’s last lecture in the Sunni auditorium at Baghdad University on why “Democracy is not a spectator sport.” Globalization has been a decidedly Western concept ever since the Greco-Roman world established trade links with the Parthians and the Han. It’s pretty evident that the Chinese and the Indians – the only two countries with more than a billion people each which together make up nearly 40% of the world’s population – find our notions of global connectivity, integration, and interdependence about as quaint as a Quaker’s chuckle. Bucket A, Bucket B, pro or con, it really doesn’t matter. You might as well try to explain to an Indian “classical” musician the difference between Mozart and Miles Davis or insist to a Chinese that opera is all about stout white men crooning Verdi. Give it another 30 years, and China will produce 40% of the world GDP, with the U.S. (15%) and the EU (5%) lagging emphatically behind. With Chinese economic hegemony and supremacy in hardware, and India’s leadership in software and an unrelenting focus on scientific and technical education, and a potential coming together of two powerful allies at the purposeful exclusion of the United States, the economic, political, and social constructs of the West have lost their relevance as far as the Dragon and the Tiger are concerned (notwithstanding the tragic reality that both countries will still have to lift hundreds of millions out of abject poverty.)

Please feel free to contact me (christophe.kolb@talenttrust.com) should you or your company be thinking about establishing an offshore presence in either India or China. Our company Talent Trust (http://www.talenttrust.com/) has a ten-year history and successful track record of doing business in both countries and helping our clients successfully navigate some of the challenges of globalization.

There is many a pearl of wisdom to be found in Berkshire Hathaway Inc.’s celebrated Shareholder Letter, where in its most recent installment, Warren E. Buffett, the great value investor, Sage of Omaha, and all-around good (and very rich) guy issues the following warning: “Don’t ask the barber if you need a haircut.” Something about wandering into Lloyd Blankfein’s office and wondering if you should be doing more M&A deals. Tougher Wall Street regulations? For the birds! Having Goldman Sachs traders worry about global risk management – like having Saddam Hussein watch over your nuclear weapons stockpile or the brothers at Delta Tau Chi curate your wine cellar. The point: don’t ask me whether you need a remote IT workforce …

Instead, ask any economist what would happen if a given commodity – such as oil or lithium, hey you, I’m-sitting-on-a-thousand-laptop-batteries Tesla-driver – became scarce, and you might just receive a textbook, two-part answer: firstly, make more efficient use of what you have (indeed the hybrid car comes to mind); and secondly, explore alternate sources towards the same end (think windmills and solar panels). And if consumption cannot be limited regardless, the price of that commodity will, of course, continue to rise.

Whether you’re filling up at the gas station, amping your Prius, or filling positions for IT professionals as your company’s hiring manager, you’ll encounter much of the same problem: IT talent – as a local market commodity – has become preciously scarce and hence expensive and difficult to procure. And just like discussions around our Nation’s dependency on (mostly foreign) oil and other precious goods, it is impossible today not to consider the local-global context behind the demand for and supply of IT talent. Given the post-recession blues that surround us, it may come as a counter-intuitive shocker that government estimates put the shortfall in talent still this year at 10 million individuals – which it measures as the number of domestic workers required in order to just keep up with the nation’s productivity levels. (On that very point, however, on how we did manage through a jobless recovery, increasing productivity with fewer workers, I’ve just witnessed a most Dilbert-esque exchange in our Silicon Valley office, with folks now associating being no longer stuck in traffic for hours on their morning commute along the nightmarish Highway 101 as “great for me but unhealthy for the economy.”)

Driven by such irreversible demographic macro-trends as declining birth rates and the coming vacuum left by the soon-to-retire Baby Boomer generation paired with steadily dropping enrollment rates for science graduates, the impending “Talent Shortage” will become one of our great economic challenges for decades to come (making assorted trading-floor shenanigans of recent memory look paltry). Already – and especially in the field of IT – it is taking hiring managers longer to find fewer qualified candidates at higher salary levels (even in a job market where anybody fit to as much as just fog a mirror is applying for Java developer roles). (And it is perhaps a troubling matter of fact that the U.S. produces more board-certified sports therapists than computer scientists; and in Germany, another fast-aging country, there are now more landscape architects than electrical engineers.)

The Talent Shortage – I predict – will bring out the textbook economist in all the rest of us: either we make our existing people more efficient, and/or we find alternate (non-domestic, speak global) sources of talent. (The former, an exercise in what is known as “talent management,” is about creating just the right match between work and worker as well as striking an optimal balance between full- / part-time workers and internal / external positions.) The latter, often referred to as “remote staff augmentation,” works on the principle that there is an asymmetric distribution between work and workers in high- and low-cost countries, respectively (for example: the U.S. or Germany vs. Brazil, Bulgaria, or India); and that it is more practical (in most cases and for all parties concerned) to move the work, and not the worker (see my previous blog).

There are some fundamental changes in the world of work that are re-shaping the nature of both the workplace and the workforce; changes brought about by technology and globalization that are calling into question the traditional proximity between the work and the worker. Most IT professionals today have experience with distributed development teams – either as part of a geographically dispersed organization across multiple office locations or during the course of working with an offshore services provider. The notion that IT (and other forms of knowledge-) work can be done remotely, in a virtual fashion, now seems hardly revolutionary.

Just a quick statistical account of ‘Remote Working / Teleworking’ here in the States and in Europe will help make the point:

“It is estimated that 100 million U.S. workers will telecommute by 2010.” (Kiplinger)

“In a survey of 178 U.S. businesses with between 20 and 99 employees, the Yankee Group found that 79% had mobile workers, with an average of 11 mobile workers per company and 54% had telecommuters, with an average of eight telecommuters per company.” (Yankee Group)

“15% of the EU workforce can be described as ‘mobile workers’ (spending more than 10 working hours per week away from home and their main place of work) and 4% as mobile teleworkers.” (Statistical Indicators Benchmarking the Information Society)

Through remote staff augmentation, employers can remotely deploy individuals (and teams of individuals) across geographic distances and time zones, managing them and collaborating with them (almost) just as effectively as if they were all in one physical location. This is typically accomplished through enabling processes and technologies – giving rise to something akin to a “Virtual Workplace,” a collaborative and often web-based environment for performing distributed work. By electronically moving the work, rather than physically placing the worker, employers can effectively augment their local staff with global talent that is situated off-site for tasks that can be performed remotely. And given the sheer population size and ample talent pools in many low-cost countries (my current “there-is-IT-services-export-beyond-India” favorites include: Philippines, Argentina, Ukraine, Egypt, Vietnam – but let us revisit again China next year), seemingly poised to do just the opposite from our high-cost countries in terms of high fertility rates and the wholesale graduation of IT workers, the long-term fundamentals behind global talent sourcing appear to be solid.

To be an effective strategy to address the Talent Shortage remote staff augmentation must be implemented (and its effectiveness continuously measured) along the following three success factors:

Access – give yourself the flexibility you need to meet all your skills requirements, as the likelihood of finding just one offshore partner that has the breadth, depth, and ready availability of all skills required is low (consider multi-vendor arrangements for reasons of both readiness and redundancy);

Quality – remember the adage “quality is not a function of size;” find suitably sized offshore partners that will commit quality resources, regardless of business volume (there are thousands of high-quality firms in India alone that may be successfully engaged on smaller or mid-sized projects – i.e., for business volumes generally too low for the top-tier Indian vendors);

Cost – follow a diversified country approach and be careful not to over-invest in one particular offshore location which may overheat due to popularity.

If indeed the world is flat (as it has been famously and convincingly argued), or at least, if the world is becoming bigger and smaller at the same time, the dual realities of a global workforce and a virtual workplace are forcing us to simply think differently about workers and their work. Remote staff augmentation is a key part of that new thinking, as the Talent Shortage combined with rising cost pressures and the fact that many of today’s IT jobs can be performed remotely, call for a more global and virtual view of talent acquisition and delivery.

James (“Bozzy”) Boswell, the constant diarist and fierce legal mind, known to his Scottish contemporaries as the 9th Laird of Auchinleck, the grand tourist of 18th century Europe, who’d finally toured his own highlands with that other great living constancy in essayism and lexicography, Dr. (Samuel) Johnson, used to say: “I am, I flatter myself, completely a citizen of the world. In my travels through Holland, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Corsica, France, I never felt myself from home.” Bozzy’s feeling of peaceful innateness and Club Med content across Western and Central Europe had less to do with an earlier “The World Is Flat” syndrome of geopolitan enthusiasm but was likely linked to the traveler’s companionship of some vivacious young Dutchwomen of “unorthodox opinions,” a here-and-there Bawdy-house attendant, a handful of English cousins and Corsican widows, an actress named Louisa, as well as – yes, his own pièce de résistance – Rousseau’s very mistress. So much for the extent of globetrotting and the rigor of relations in those days (of course, Boswell and Johnson did not enjoy a frictionless first encounter either: “Mr. Johnson, I do indeed come from Scotland, but I cannot help it.” – “That, Sir, I find, is what a very great many of your countrymen cannot help.”)

Think of Boswell as a 270-year-old Thomas Friedman who was perhaps the first chronicler and critic of what we today call globalization. A popular account of the forces at work that collectively give rise to ‘that thing’ treading between starvation and salvation referred to as globalization can be found in Friedman’s rather readable 1999 book The Lexus and the Olive Tree, whereas for a more serious treatment of the subject consult the 2002 book Globalization and Its Discontents by 2001 Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz. And just as in Boswell’s days, we cannot help but notice that the world has become a bigger and smaller place, both at once. And I’m not just talking about the joys of cheap easyJet tickets or essentially free international Skype calls to shorten the distance between our favorite English cousins and Corsican widows. For the scope of this blog I constantly marvel (how Boswellian) at three trends:

The increasingly global nature of business;

The rapid changes brought about by always-evolving technology; and

The reshaping of the world’s labor markets as a consequence of the above two.

Put another way, today’s workforce is global, their workplace is virtual, everything is enabled by technology (and if you don’t keep up, yes you’ll be ‘disabled,’ in a sense), and we’ll all be astounded by the rising complexity of that corporate growth engine known as “knowledge work.” One of the central insights from the ‘tectonically shifting’ labor markets is indeed: that work is something we do, not (just) a place we go to. The economic corollary being (and where Stiglitz gets his hiccups) that with globalization in full fore, it is simply easier (and cheaper) to move the work, than it is to move the worker. And this is typically the point when the Davos crowd departs to leave IT Management in charge of “practical next steps.”

Remote staff augmentation can be an attractive and viable alternative to either hiring local consultants or offshoring entire projects. Successful practitioners can enjoy the offshore savings (30-50% compared to the cost of an onsite contractor) without the loss of control often associated with outsourcing. Imagine managing your remote IT professionals as if they were your own, geographically dispersed employees. The combination of offshore benefits together with the flexibility and control of staff augmentation is what makes this a compelling engagement model. However, working with remote third-party resources requires, first and foremost, trust. Building that trust – a sense of reliability and confidence in predictable performance – takes time; there are no shortcuts and no substitute for “trial and error.” Help, where’s the Remote Control!

Here’s the list of “buttons” on that control panel for a successful remote staff engagement:

Call me a techie, something of a science-minded Skeptic who looks upon the ever-growing shelf of self-help titles for the executive set (and aspiring cadre) with a mixture of some bewilderment, little amusement-cum-disdain, and lots of professional jealousy. How come “they” have it and “we in IT” don’t? Meaning the inspired and adapted learnings of history’s greats to better one’s management skills. Just imagine our very own reading list: “Metternich on Winning Over Business Owners,” “George Smith Patton III, the Gatling Gun, and the Importance of IT,” or “À la Bonaparte – Supreme Power to the Little Guy” …

Nothing, however, beats management by Sun Tzu, his 6th century BC The Art of War a timeless classic on military strategy and thought. This enduring treatise which is, of course, shockingly contemporary in parts, stresses the importance of deception, cunning, and spying on others; not doing what you say you’re going to do emerges as the leitmotif, while it offers helpful advice on how to turn spies, punish turncoats, poison wells, and generally deal away with modern-day peasants in feudal lands, speak voiceless underlings. Self-proclaimed Machiavellian corporate strivers and intriguers may be strangely drawn to Il Principe, short enough of a posthumous Renaissance political essay to be digested between cafeteria lunches, where readers will be instructed in the method of acquiring necessary ends by any means, even if they are cruel. Supply chain management (SCM) types will find well-founded solace in being the rightful heirs to no other than Gaius Julius Caesar, partly-Consul and mostly-Dictator of the Roman Republic, his only regret when crossing the Rubicon not having had the SAP BI Platform to help track the dwindling corn supplies which would cripple his Gallic campaign. And finally, if you’ve been too successful a manager, beaten the competition to a pulp, and even your grinning shareholders are worried about your Emotional Intelligence (EI) score, there’s always Hildegard of Bingen to help you get back in touch with your inner Medieval Benedictine abbess, herbalist, poet, and channeller (the lesson there: don’t be afraid of your own success!).

But no, we (in IT) shall have none of that! We prefer such solemn encouragement as “attitude is a little thing that makes a big difference” from noted statesman, gifted orator, and arguably one of the greatest 20th century task masters in a distributed environment, The Right Honourable Sir Winston Churchill. Churchill managed one of the largest physically distributed field operations of his days by a set of rules that are prescriptive for any remote IT engagement:

Plan (vigorously);

Communicate (constantly);

Collaborate (and get the best out of others);

Be proactive (and always visible);

Govern (keep and refine metrics of success);

And, of course, persist (never, never, never give up – remember this is the man who said: “If you’re going through hell, keep going.”).

To optimize outcomes, Churchill was fond of running alternative scenarios, a quick A vs. B “hypothesis testing” for every decision he made. I’ve applied the same method, including some probing questions, for helping us determine an optimal approach for setting up a remote resourcing environment:

Captive vs. Non-Captive:
The benefits of a captive offshore operation are obvious (dedicated resources, significant cost savings after start-up costs are recouped / no middleman, full control / security, quality imprint, in-house culture / communication, in-market sales presence, etc.); but some of the drawbacks may be less obvious (static resourcing / difficulties with right-skilling and load-balancing, dependence on single geography / economy / labor market can mean wage inflation / talent shortage / staff attrition, bench- and lead-time challenges responding to user demand, etc.). What criteria would you use to weigh the benefits/drawbacks of a captive vs. a non-captive offshore operation?

“DIY” vs. Managing Vendor:
Faced with the task of setting up and managing a portfolio of multiple, sequential vendor relations, what ‘value equation’ would persuade you to outsource vs. in-house the management of that portfolio? (E.g., managing-vendor expertise, economies of scale associated with managing the costs of (sequential) vendor discovery, setup, transition, and ongoing coordination, etc.)?

Single Partner- vs. Multi-Vendor:
When considering a non-captive offshore operation, what decision criteria would you use to establish a partner-based vs. a vendor-based approach? (E.g., cost- / risk-sharing, price breaks based on volume, other commitments from a single partner vs. “best-of-breed” every time / breadth and depth, flexibility / no single point of dependence when sourcing from multiple vendors, etc.)

Tier-1 vs. Tier-2:
What is your experience working with tier-1 vs. tier-2 vendors? (E.g., professionalism, process maturity / CMM:5 vs. entrepreneurship, “working with heroes,” etc.). Can you relate to the statement “quality is not a function of size”?

India vs. ‘The Rest of the World’:
Have you had experience resourcing from some of the “other” offshore regions: South America (e.g., Argentina, Brazil), Eastern Europe (e.g., Romania, Ukraine), North Africa/Egypt, Southeast Asia (e.g., Vietnam), China? How would you relate this to your ‘India experience,’ if any, in terms of critical success factors (e.g., quality, flexibility, cost – i.e., is India – with its ~30% staff turnover and ~20% wage inflation – trending after Ireland which priced itself out of the call-center business in the 90s?)?

Synchronous vs. Asynchronous:
What are the key drivers for you to insist on time zone overlap to enable synchronous (e.g., U.S. / South America) vs. asynchronous collaboration (e.g., U.S. / India)? What experience have you had, if any, with more advanced “follow-the-sun” and multiple-shift 24×7 development / support models?

Standalone vs. Distributed:
Have you noticed an increase in complexity managing remote resources as part of a distributed (onsite-offsite) team vs. managing them on a standalone basis?

The “Impossible Triangle” of Quality, Flexibility (Availability), and Cost – Tradeoff vs. Optimal:
Trying to optimize all three dimensions (quality/flexibility/cost – or for project-based work: scope/schedule/cost), how would you prioritize them in order to further drive profitable growth? Furthermore, how important is the “4th” dimension (control)? Does the (relative) importance of control (project management / outcomes ownership) influence your structuring of offshoring engagements: staff augmentation vs. project outsourcing, Time & Materials (T&M) vs. Fixed-Price Contracts?

Today vs. Tomorrow:
Is the impending shortfall in workers and skills (“Talent Shortage/War For Talent”) due to demographics / macroeconomics already impacting your firm? Or, impacting your future resource planning? And, given how technology and globalization are re-shaping both the workplace and the workforce, are you looking at alternate strategies for sourcing and deploying talent (globally, virtually)?

Today, I bid you a “guten Tag” as your far-flung correspondent is leaving what a former profligate United States Secretary of Defense used to call the “Old Europe,” where I’ve been attending a gathering of ‘human capital’ management consultants. Listening to the consulting speak of such human capitalists for an evening on an Alpine lake, I felt reminded indeed of Rumsfeld’s more contemporary “re”-definition of NATO, offered up in one of his perpetual digs against the sclerotic and old-fashioned ‘new’ Ancien Régime as “No Action Talk Only.” Though lacking the requisite (and priceless) consulting vernacular (able however to explain why Germans don’t drink water, for in wine there’s wisdom, in beer there’s strength, whereas in water there’s bacteria), I was asked to prognosticate on some key trends impacting the labor markets.

Here is the formula I used to foretell what I believe will happen in the world of work:

“Trends / disruptive forces in the labor markets …” -> “… are forcing tectonic shifts from the old labor model …” -> “… to a new labor model …” -> “… and with new paradigms to explore / opportunities to exploit:”

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Christophe Kolb

Christophe is one of the original pioneers of the technology-enabled remote services industry.

He co-founded Talent Trust (http://www.talenttrust.com) in 2000 to help clients meet their staffing needs with flexible access to highly skilled IT professionals located offshore.

Talent Trust, the reliable and flexible offshore partner you’ve come to know and trust over the last decade is now tightly focused on providing innovative and affordable mobile solutions for the enterprise. Headquartered in San Francisco, Talent Trust employs mobile experts at our own development centers in Córdoba, Argentina and Lima, Peru.

What Makes Us Different? Experience the Power of Global Entrepreneurship.
Completely hands on and entrepreneurial to the core, our overseas management teams and senior developers have a direct interest in the success of their operation. This incentive model promotes long term resource continuity and ensures unconditional alignment with our clients’ success. As a result, our employees treat their clients’ projects as their own and infuse each engagement with an entrepreneur’s “must win” spirit – in contrast to the “nine to five” norm.

Backed by a Team of Local Experts.
In addition, a dedicated San Francisco-based engagement management team guarantees our clients’ satisfaction, specifically taking over the extra tasks associated with offshoring that arise from physical separation. An integral part of the Talent Trust offering, this onshore service is designed to take the friction out of working remotely and ranges in scope from: screening, matching, and allocating the resources; to monitoring their work along with productivity metrics, reporting on progress and project milestones, and facilitating communication; all the way to flagging and resolving any problems, timekeeping, and billing.

Are you looking to build valuable and cost-effective IT solutions that will help your company win in business? And are you looking for entrepreneurial resources that will go the extra mile to ensure your success? Then please visit our web site www.talenttrust.com to learn more, or contact me directly at christophe.kolb@talenttrust.com.

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Christophe Kolb

Christophe is one of the original pioneers of the technology-enabled remote services industry.

He co-founded Talent Trust (http://www.talenttrust.com) in 2000 to help clients meet their staffing needs with flexible access to highly skilled IT professionals located offshore.

Talent Trust, the reliable and flexible offshore partner you’ve come to know and trust over the last decade is now tightly focused on providing innovative and affordable mobile solutions for the enterprise. Headquartered in San Francisco, Talent Trust employs mobile experts at our own development centers in Córdoba, Argentina and Lima, Peru.

What Makes Us Different? Experience the Power of Global Entrepreneurship.
Completely hands on and entrepreneurial to the core, our overseas management teams and senior developers have a direct interest in the success of their operation. This incentive model promotes long term resource continuity and ensures unconditional alignment with our clients’ success. As a result, our employees treat their clients’ projects as their own and infuse each engagement with an entrepreneur’s “must win” spirit – in contrast to the “nine to five” norm.

Backed by a Team of Local Experts.
In addition, a dedicated San Francisco-based engagement management team guarantees our clients’ satisfaction, specifically taking over the extra tasks associated with offshoring that arise from physical separation. An integral part of the Talent Trust offering, this onshore service is designed to take the friction out of working remotely and ranges in scope from: screening, matching, and allocating the resources; to monitoring their work along with productivity metrics, reporting on progress and project milestones, and facilitating communication; all the way to flagging and resolving any problems, timekeeping, and billing.

Are you looking to build valuable and cost-effective IT solutions that will help your company win in business? And are you looking for entrepreneurial resources that will go the extra mile to ensure your success? Then please visit our web site www.talenttrust.com to learn more, or contact me directly at christophe.kolb@talenttrust.com.